As Tolstoy once said,
at least according to TV's SEINFELD: "War, what is it
good for?" That was the original title of WAR AND PEACE, Jerry persuaded
Elaine to believe (with disastrous results for her publishing career). War is
indeed, as the question implies, good for nothing much. It is good, we have
learned over the last several millennia, for death, destruction and worldwide
suffering.

But in the mostly
non-lethal world of a film festival war is transformed, annually or
seasonally, from a destruction force to a debating topic. "War war" becomes "jaw jaw,"
cinematically speaking, which like Winston Churchill we can view as far, far
preferable.

The 66thVenice Film Festival, more
than any in recent memory, was obsessed with unpicking the mysteries and miseries
of war. If war didn't exist, the festival's movies almost imply, humans would
have to invent it. Art thrives on tragic extremes, especially if rooted in
reality, and the whole globe today - which means the whole globe's culture -
is troubled by the shape war will take in coming decades. Will that shape be
destruction by nuclear blasts? Will it be an ongoing sequence of asymmetrical
wars like those fought in the last half century (from Vietnam to the war on
terror')? Will it be war by military violence; will it be war by chemical
virus? The scenarios multiply. So do the movies. You show me your dreams or
nightmares, I'11 show you mine.

The Golden Lion
victor, Samuel Maoz'sLEBANON, was merely the most
upfront and out-front example of the variety of films on this theme. Before LEBANON, Venicegoers
had sampled Giuseppe Tornatore's BAARIA, John Hillcoat's THE ROAD, Todd Solondz's LIFE DURING WARTIME,
Lei Wangzi's YONFAN. After LEBANON, they had Claire
Denis's WHITE MATERIAL, George A Romero’s
SURVIVAL
OF THE DEAD, Grant Heslov's THE MEN WHO STARE AT
GOATS. All different facets of that dark jewel called the war movie.

The very first two
entries in the competition's schedule staked out the opposing styles and
approaches. (Or the principal set of opposing styles and approaches).
In BAARIA Tornatore gives us, in his film's middle
section, a World War 2 actual and factual - this is broadly how it was - even
if inflected by the CINEMA PARADISO director's brand of
magical neorealism. The child's-eye view enhances the heroism and
the horror. Tornatore's war has to be
broadly real; it is there to catalyse the
characters' lives and to explain an entire Italian generation; it is there to
show how the resistance's anti-fascism sowed the seeds of postwar Marxism.

THE ROAD is fantasy
cinema's response. Australo-American fantasy. An
unreal, but in US novelist Cormac McCarthy and
Aussie filmmaker John Hillcoat's heads all too
possible, conflict has detonated the world's end. America is a smouldering ash-heap. Across it trek the hope-challenged
survivors, the father and the boy, plus a few stoical or sinister bands of
vagrants. This is how the planet finishes or might do. With a wipe­out bang
followed by the poignant whimper, the doomed defiant rallentando, of the lives that refuse to let go.

This yin and yang -
realistic versus imaginary delineations of war - continued like a pendulum
throughout the festival. What enriches this two-way rhythm was that few of
the movies were simply representative of one side or the other. You could
call THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS a comical-Kafkaesque fantasy on the extremes
of paranoid behaviour possible in alumni of the
Pentagon: those `psy ops' graduates who
think that human bipeds and goatee'd quadrupeds can
both be felled by the killer stares of trained military psych-artists. But
the film was based on a nonfiction book, culled from interviews with actual
members of Uncle Sam's cabal, by journalist Jon Ronson.
So what was fantasy and what was fact?

Similarly, yet
differently, Clair Denis's WHITE MATERIAL
seems to be a story inspired by Zimbabwe: a white farmer (Isabelle Huppert)
threatened with eviction during a black-ruled country's brutal war on its
onetime colonials. Yet the country is unnamed and Denis, as
befits the director of CHOCOLAT and BEAU TRAVAIL,
seems more interested in stretching the story into a ballet sauvage, a Greek-tragedy-­gone-African, than in inviting
nitty-gritty comparisons with actual modern history. WHITE MATERIAL is about
the eternal war not just between the haves and have­nots
but arguably - and provocatively - between the should-rules and
shouldn't-rules.

With Lei Wangzi's underrated, fascinating YONFAN another real
convulsion in a real nation's history, the anticommunist purges in 1950s
Taiwan, is turned to myth or even fairytale. The child's eye view reigns
again (as in BAARIA), though it becomes a chillingly believable tool of
vision - even amid the pastel picture-book colours
- as the children concerned watch the persecution, purging and in one scene
execution of those dearest to them. This is a story about the dreamtime of
childhood turning, without identifiable transition point, into nightmare.

Two American movies,
finally, gave us a different and even deeper pairing of `yin' and `yang.'
Neither SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD nor LIFE DURING WARTIME is about any war you can
find in a history book. But each is about war in its own way. George A Romero’s latest
zombie gig is about war as pandemic, a disease that once set raging - like
this latest outbreak of lumbering-undead mayhem - knows no frontiers, no
border posts, no quarantine refuges like (in theory and expectation) the
island the characters flee to in hope of safety. But even here, exacerbated
by an old feud between families, the virus soon rages. For Romero the ultimate truth of life is: everyone wants
to kill everyone else. Whether you are on the good side or the bad side,
whatever those terms mean, is a technicality.

There is more kinship
than we ever thought between George A Romero
and
Todd Solondz. There is no war at all, despite its title, in LIFE DURING
WARTIME. Yet there is a state of war ruthless and unending. It involves all
the characters and it implicates, like SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD, the oldest locus
belli of all: the family. No one can war like a family.
Not just a family which opens hostilities against other families, but a
family warring within itself.

Solondz's film is a
sequel to HAPPINESS. Which raises the mischievous question: Is there a sequel
to happiness? If so, what is it? Perhaps, like war, it is the desperate,
violent, no-holds-barred attempt, by those who have known and lost happiness,
to retrieve and repossess it. Someone - call him the enemy - has stolen it
away from us. And life, even emotional and interior life, is territorial.
When hostile humans or circumstances move in on Fortress Happiness, we are
all quick to declare war. From that microcosm of conflict it is a small step
to the macrocosm. From the macrocosm, it is an even shorter step to the
apocalypse. THE ROAD merely lies at the far end of the highway, a highway
littered with intervening realities and tragedies, from LIFE DURING WARTIME.

COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS.

WITH THANKS TO THE
AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA.